Producer Jeff Pope tells Benji Wilson why Appropriate Adult, his
portrait of the serial killer Fred West, is in the public interest.

Jeff Pope’s CV as a television producer is broadly divisible between laughter and death. He takes pains to flag up the funny stuff – Bob Martin, Northern Lights, Planespotting – but the standout single films he has produced, all of them for ITV, have been factual dramas about murder. Murder in the Outback, The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper and 2006’s Bafta-winning See No Evil: The Moors Murders need little further explanation.

It’s a theme that continues with his latest film for ITV on Sunday, Appropriate Adult. This time the serial killers are Fred and Rose West, who murdered 12 young women between 1967 and 1987, and buried their bodies beneath the patio of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Dominic West is an eerily convincing Fred – eerie not just because the face fits, but because Fred West seemed so normal.

This was precisely what drew Pope to the subject: he heard West’s voice on a Channel 5 documentary in 2001 and was struck by his easy manner.

“Sutcliffe and Brady conform to our preconceived idea of what a serial killer looks and sounds like – you can sense a sort of hatred in their eyes. Fred was just nothing like that. He was this rotund, apparently jolly individual. He appeared to be the antithesis of what we think a serial killer is. That intrigued me.”

This was a decade ago. But an intriguing demeanour and some notorious events did not, in Pope’s eyes, justify a dramatisation.

“I wasn’t interested in a story about him and Rose per se. I think you’ve got to have a reason for tackling a subject like this other than what were they like and what did they do. I don’t think there’s a lot to be learned – in terms of a mainstream drama – from that.”

Pope’s way into the story came through Janet Leach, the appropriate adult of the title. “Appropriate adults” are volunteers who can be asked by the police to sit in on interviews with minors or vulnerable adults in order to assist them and safeguard their rights.

Leach, played here by Emily Watson, became a confidante to West when he was arrested in 1994, and has worked closely with Pope and writer Neil McKay on the drama.

“The thing about Janet was that she was… us. She was a normal mother of five. All she is told when she goes into that first interview is: you [will] stand as an appropriate adult to a 52-year-old man with learning difficulties. And then she goes through the whole horrific process.”

Pope deals in subject matter that, by its very nature, is controversial. When Appropriate Adult was announced, Anne-Marie Davis, Fred West’s daughter by his first wife, told a newspaper the drama will “cause unimaginable distress to the families of the young girls who were murdered” and that its makers were doing it solely “to make money”.

“That was distressing,” says Pope. “My first reaction was that she is absolutely entitled to say what she feels if anyone is – but it’s a shame she said it before she’d seen it.”

The producers of Appropriate Adult say they tried to involve Davis in the film-making process and offered to talk her through the scripts. She declined.

“And then she chose not to come to us and say, ‘This is my problem with what you’re doing,’ but to go public with it,” says Pope. “She’s entitled to do that. We’ve asked her if she wants to watch the finished film and we’ve not heard back. But on a very positive note her half-sisters May and Louise have seen it and are very supportive.”

Davis’s other indictment – that this is sensationalism for financial gain – Pope rebuts.

“Economically, single dramas are not profitable. ITV does them because they want to be a channel that’s perceived as tackling stuff like this. We’ve been doing them consistently now for well over 20 years.” He sees films like Appropriate Adult as one of the dying embers of public service broadcasting. “The BBC will transmit stuff that’s not necessary popular but is sort of ‘good for you’ and I think this is ITV doing the same.”

What of another charge – that Pope’s enduring fascinating with making films about serial killers is, well, a little bit weird?

“The reason why these sort of stories interest me is not for ghoulish reasons but if you have a passion for drama, which I do, then what you’re looking for are extremes of behaviour. And these are the kinds of stories where you find them.”